Lately we’ve seen a trend worth talking about. More owners and boards are electing to run their own pre-bid walkthrough, keeping our engineers out of the room to shave a little off the project fees. Sometimes there’s a capable owner’s representative on staff who knows construction. More often it’s simply a line item that looks easy to cut. We understand the instinct, especially when budgets are tight, but on restoration projects in particular, taking the engineer out of the walkthrough is one of those decisions that saves a few dollars up front and tends to cost a great deal more on the back end.
A pre-bid walkthrough, sometimes called a pre-bid conference or job walk, is far more than a formality (though if done right, it certainly feels like one). It is the one moment before pricing when every prospective bidder stands in front of the same wall, the same roof, the same failing balcony, and gets to see the real conditions with their own eyes. On new construction, the drawings tell most of the story. On restoration and repair work, they can’t. The full extent of deterioration is frequently unknown until demolition begins, which means the walkthrough is where a contractor’s assumptions about hidden conditions are either confirmed or corrected. Industry repair guidance specifically recommends that the engineer, owner, and prospective contractors meet before bids are submitted, and that this meeting include a visit to the site. The reason it goes a long way toward eliminating disputes and claims once construction is underway. Money spent clarifying scope before bids come in is money that doesn’t turn into change orders, arguments, and delays later.
The most common reason we hear is, “We have someone in-house who can handle it.” And a lot of the time that person is really good at what they do, but an owner’s representative and the engineer of record are not interchangeable. When a contractor stands on the roof and asks why a detail is drawn the way it is, or whether a substitution is acceptable, or what the design intends at a particular flashing condition, those are technical questions with technical answers, and the honest response from most owner’s reps is that they’ll have to check with the engineer. The issue then isn’t really whether the engineer is involved, it’s whether the engineer is involved in the room, in real time, or after the fact through a game of telephone that slows everyone down and invites misinterpretation.
Put simply, if the questions are going to come back to us anyway, everyone is better served by us being there when they’re asked.
When the design professional isn’t present, the walkthrough loses its single most valuable feature: the live question-and-answer. Contractors are often at their sharpest here. One bidder will ask about an existing condition the others hadn’t considered, and suddenly the whole field is pricing the job more accurately. Remove the person who can actually answer those questions and you don’t eliminate the questions, you just push them to after bids are submitted, when it’s far more expensive to resolve them and too late to level the playing field, the Board or Owner is already eyeing the lowest cost!
There’s a procedural piece here too. Only a written addendum formally changes the bid documents. When an engineer runs the walkthrough, the questions raised get documented and issued as an addendum to every bidder, attending or not, so everyone prices the same scope. A verbal answer given in a parking lot changes nothing on paper and can quietly favor whoever happened to be standing closest.
Another potential issue we have run across recently is when we’re taken out of the process, we’re often not asked to prepare the bid form either. On its face that seems harmless. Everyone’s bidding on the same drawings and specs, so the numbers should be comparable, right?
Not quite. Without a standardized bid form, every contractor breaks the work down their own way. One lumps everything into a single figure. Another itemizes. A third buries assumptions and exclusions in fine print that resurface as extras during construction. You end up with a stack of numbers that look like they’re comparable but aren’t, and the lowest one is often lowest because something was left out. A well-outlined bid form forces every bidder into the same line-item structure, with unit prices for the work whose quantities can’t be fully known until work is underway. That structure is what makes a genuine apples-to-apples comparison possible, and it’s what protects the Owner from picking a “low” bid that becomes the most expensive once the change orders roll in.
We try to see both sides of every argument, so in fairness there are cases where a client-run walkthrough is reasonable. For small, straightforward, low-value work with little hidden-condition risk, a full engineered process can be more than the job needs. If you have a seasoned owner’s rep who genuinely understands construction and who will still route technical questions to the designer of record and document answers properly, the room is in better hands than most. And on repeat scopes a savvy team has priced many times before, the marginal value of our attendance might be lower.
The common thread in those exceptions is low technical complexity and low uncertainty. Restoration work, almost by definition, is neither. It lives in the gap between what the drawings show and what’s actually behind the wall, and that gap is exactly where engineering judgment earns its keep, but that may be a whole other article!
Fees matter, and we’d never fault an owner for scrutinizing them; but the pre-bid walkthrough isn’t where the savings are. Skipping our involvement doesn’t remove the technical questions, the hidden conditions, or the need to compare bids fairly. It just moves all of that downstream, into construction, where problems are slower and costlier to fix. Spending a modest amount to have us in the room, answering questions, documenting addenda, and standardizing the bid form is one of the highest-return decisions on the whole project.
Kevin M. Duffy
Principal
Duffy Engineering
